In another enticing session of the L&D Annual League Conference, two experts from different backgrounds of corporate and education sector brought in a potpourri of information of how they have embraced L&D in their respective organization.

Katarina Karalic, P&G:  A psychologist with 10 years of experience in the HR field with keen interest in leveraging applied I/O psychology in cross-cultural environment of multinationals enlightened the crowd with her current Learning & Development role in India.  Along with working in business schools and corporate world, she also wrote white papers and few articles. 

Talking about the importance of L&D training, Karalic made a strong point of the need to change, our attitude towards learning in order to bring in a transformation to our business. We need to rise out of the traditional L&D program and accept the contemporary L&D approach. But will this exceed our budget sheet of organization? Or shall we end up discontinuing L&D as a function altogether?

No, we won’t. All we need to do is think differently in order to cater to the needs and expectations of the modern learner and millennial. To be precise we need to act more like a challenger and a consultant.  This is the kind of role which is expected to play in an organization in today’s world. 

L&D journey of P&G

Karalic also gave an insight to the L&D journey of P&G and of how it is able to deliver good results with less number of people. They have also acknowledged that in order to bring learning culture, training is not the sole solution. P&G structure helps to deliver good results with less number of people. “We are global scale solution provider and best in class for leveraging our scale”, said Karalic. They understood that in order to bring learning culture, the answer is not just training. She further said that, “in India, we need to have a successful personal development plan in order to bring in a learning culture. Hence, in P&G, we enable people to personal development program”. 

Prof. PB Venkataraman, BITS: In the second half of the session, Prof. Venkataraman engaged the audience with a short and a creative video on ‘Product Lifecycle’.  He started with a very famous line “We know more than we can tell”, a very confusing statement but with lots of implications. Getting into more depth of it, he said that there are two types of knowledge, one that we can articulate which is called explicit knowledge and the other which cannot be articulated is the tacit. For e.g., the company Maruti has experts who can assemble the automobile parts but cannot drive a car because assembling is the explicit knowledge. In terms of organizational context it is seen that 80% of knowledge is tacit for e.g. elements like strategic planning, forecasting, problem solving and decision making. Coming to sector of executive students it is the tacit knowledge that will be stressed upon but it carries its own set of challenges with it and this kind of knowledge cannot be articulated. This is one of the prime challenges associated with the transfer of tacit knowledge. Like every problem has a solution, the key to transfer of tacit knowledge lies in the pedagogy and not in the content. This planned procedure takes place in four defined steps. He also explained how these four stages have been integrated in the pedagogical design of work and offered to the students of BITS as integrated programme.

Active observation- The pedagogical tool used is video case, a collection of set of videos of an organization wherein the students are required to go through the video and answer a set of questions at the end of it. This is a quite a different approach than the conventional case study.

Assisted Practice- These include work integrated learning exercise that is given to the students to implement in a prescribed format and get the outcome finally. 

Simulation- This is one of the super focus areas. This is quite handy as it enables to look at things that are not seen in an actual environment. Along with software, students are given set of tutorials in order to have their practice and refine their skill sets.

Gamification- A context that is very powerful compared to our intellect, value and knowledge system. So a pedagogical tool is needed to de-contextualize learning and Gamification is one such tool which creates a difference. 

In a nutshell, in order to transform the learning culture in an organization one needs to emerge out of the traditional learning approach and accept various learning methodology in order to excel in business.

(This article is based on the session on Innovative Learning Models: Hear how you can shift the role of L&D function from an order to a consultant at L&D Annual League Conference.)